anthropology with business: plural programs and future financial

Anthropology with Business: Plural Programs

and Future Financial Worlds

Bill Maurer & Scott D. Mainwaring

Abstract

How can we imagine and perform an anthropological practice with

business, that is, not from a distanced perspective but through a mutual

infolding and engagement? How might such an arrangement then be

exemplary for novel economic experiments of the kind anthropologists

often describe? Reflecting on several years' of collaborations with each

other, the authors recount their relationship as an experiment in novel

engagements with economic things (money, corporations, universities,

accounting principles, computers, etc.) in an industrial and university

site. The paper puts forward a theoretical argument about exaptive and

nonadaptive plurality that opens new pathways for alternative and

sometimes quite conventional values. The context is a specific set of

projects around money and payment. The intellectual background is the

anthropology of finance and alternative economies.

Keywords

Money, finance, Intel, ethnography, value

of 20

JBA 1 (2): 177-196

Autumn 2012

© The Author(s) 2012

ISSN 2245-4217

www.cbs.dk/jba

Journal of Business Anthropology, 1(2), Autumn 2012

178

Introduction

The occasion of this journal invites reflection on the possible

prepositions linking anthropology and business. The first, most obvious,

is that a journal of “business anthropology” would concern various

anthropological approaches to business, or anthropologies of business.

Yet at the same time, as many anthropologists working in industrial and

business settings have discovered and even celebrated, working on

business often entails working in business (Cefkin, 2009). Gaining

access and rapport, the anthropologist works alongside colleagues in

industrial settings, participating, observing, and along the way getting

caught up in various business ventures. There may still be the

assumption, however, that the anthropologist will pull away again, leave

the business setting for the academic halls and the journal articles, step

outside the temporality of quarterly performance goals or the annual

report and back into the slower time of the classroom, peer review,

publication and the historical, ethnographic and scholarly archives.

Academic knowledge after all is supposed to endure, and to transcend

the moment. Business knowledge is for use, in the present or near

future: of necessity - and for publicly traded companies, by law - tied to

quarterly earnings statements and the fiscal year. An academic article in

the social sciences is deemed a classic if people are still reading it in 20

or 30 years. A corporation’s long-range product roadmap may extend, at

most, 10 years, and in many industries its time horizon is much shorter.

Business and anthropology inhabit different temporal horizons.

In this essay, however, we reflect on another temporality and

another prepositional relation of anthropology and business:

anthropology with business. “With,” for us, implies an ongoing

relationship, the entanglements of kinship and alliance more than

observation or canned participation. We speculate on our own

collaboration as a process of being drawn into relation with each other’s

projects and perspectives, an exchange which, while not altogether

mutual or equal, not without its frictions and contradictions,

nevertheless has opened up plural possibilities for our own work, for

the work of others around us, and for our respective institutional

locations (in the largest public university system, and in a gigantic

publicly traded IT company). Because our collaboration is about money

– what it has been, what it is becoming, what it might be in the future – it

contributes to specific plural and diverse economies for money, for

finance, for knowledge production. This essay is thus an anthropology of

finance. It is about our own relations of credit and debt with each other

and between our respective institutions, and the parallel movements we

have been tracking of alternative financial and monetary practices and

technologically-mediated means of value transfer. The business

propositions of the products we have been involved in are all related

Maurer & Mainwaring/ Anthropology with Business

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directly to new financial systems and new technologies of money. One of

the aims of our work has been to bring to scholars’ and start-ups’

attention the back-offices and hidden infrastructures of money. And

along the way, our collaboration has resulted in novel institutional

arrangements for the financing of research in academia and industry,

arrangements that brought others into our orbit and these back-offices

of money and payment.

Payments innovations are not unrelated to the financial crisis.

Coincident with the financial crisis has been both the decline in the use

of credit cards and the rise of prepaid instruments, on the one hand

(Jacob & Lunn, 2011), and the explosion in social media, on the other.

The payments industry itself is shifting from being primarily based on a

business model that relies on interest and credit, to one more centrally

concerned with fees and, increasingly, access to transaction data. In the

consumer finance domain, “bad bets” (on subprime mortgages, on

riskier clients) are giving way to “big data” (World Economic Forum,

2011).

The anthropology of finance as a field is roughly coincident in

time with our collaboration: we began thinking together about various

technological futures for money at the same time that Maurer was

compiling several review essays of disparate anthropological studies in

financial spaces and worlds (Maurer, 2005; Maurer, 2006). A couple of

anthropologists were just completing their dissertations on financial

topics (Ho, 2009; Zaloom, 2006). Science and technology studies (STS)

scholars who had begun to investigate finance were reaching out to

anthropologists, and “social studies of finance” (SSF) was developing as

a subfield at the intersection of sociology and STS. Sociologists and STS

scholars associated with Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, Donald MacKenzie

and David Stark had just founded the Association d’études sociales de la

finance in 2000 and the Socialising Finance blog in 2007.1

Also coincident with our collaboration was the global financial

crisis that began in 2008. Indeed, one of the major “outputs” of our

collaboration, a conference titled, Everyday Digital Money,2 took place

just as the foundations of Wall Street were shaking. Anthropologist

Keith Hart, our keynote on 24 September 2008, just 9 days after Lehman

Brothers failed, threw out his prepared remarks and spoke off the cuff

about the growing financial calamity. Since that time, anthropologists

have assumed public roles in the debate over finance. The Financial

1 As with many interdisciplinary endeavours, anthropology’s contribution had been and to an extent remains its signature methodology, ethnography, as well as its knack for defamiliarization.

2 http://emoney.typepad.com


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Times’ reporter Gillian Tett, an anthropologist by training, became a

leading guide through the unfolding debacle and became herself a topic

in the academic debates over how to study finance (MacKenzie, 2009).

Karen Ho’s well received book chronicling the lives of financial

professionals during an earlier crisis garnered her several televised

media appearances. David Graeber’s (2011) book, Debt: The First 5000

Years, hit the bookstores and barricades as the Occupy Wall Street

movement took to the streets.

These are just a few examples of the public face of the

anthropology of finance since the crisis. In other quarters,

anthropologists have worked behind the scenes, with regulators,

financial engineers, investors, and start-up companies. Our

collaboration is one example, and it spawned others, as we discuss

below. Also behind the scenes have been the intellectual disagreements

within this nascent scholarly community. While some make bold

pronouncements about Crisis, Financial Abstraction and whatnot – we

will not cite any names here – and others (Roitman, 2013) seek more

modestly to correct them, another couple of debates have been taking

place under the tent. Donald MacKenzie’s (2009) review of Gillian Tett’s

(2009) book helped crystallize one, and Annelise Riles (2010) made

another, related debate more explicit. These debates are instructive for

thinking about anthropology and business collaborations like ours, so,

before detailing our own work as an emergent economic actor of a

particular sort, let us briefly review those debates.

First, have the SSF scholars and anthropologists “gone native?”

That is, in their careful dissection of the methods, tools and calculative

rationalities of financial practice, have they lost sight of the larger

picture of expropriation, inequality, instability and crisis? If one starts

from the assumption that all financiers are bad, then the nuanced

accounts of the lives and tools of the bankers and traders are apologias

for their recklessness and immorality. Is “good,” that is, prudent, morally

sustainable finance, possible? Those like MacKenzie and Tett who would

answer yes have faced criticism from more Marxist colleagues. The

Socialising Finance blog had a discussion on this exact topic after a 2010

conference in Paris restaged what has become a familiar debate: the

political economists accuse the SSF scholars of getting lost in the

technical details of finance to the detriment of political critique.3 This is

clearly a concern in any anthropology/industry collaboration. Such

3 Daniel Beunza provided a perspective on this Paris conference on his blog, Socialising Finance. See http://socfinance.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/political-economists-denounce-social-studies-of-finance-for-overlooking-the-political/

http://socfinance.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/political-economists-denounce-social-studies-of-finance-for-overlooking-the-political/

http://socfinance.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/political-economists-denounce-social-studies-of-finance-for-overlooking-the-political/


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collaborations can allow a degree of access that makes it easier to get

caught up in the technicalities to the detriment of seeing the “larger

picture.”

Second, related to the first, has the focus on technical procedures

and financial models placed the focus on the technoscientific aspects of

finance to the neglect of the legal, regulatory, and politico-ethical worlds

that create the playing field for finance? If one focuses on the technical

aspects of their work, then the contracts, documentary practices and

political battles about regulation get sidelined – and here is a place

where anthropology might actually make a difference (Riles, 2011).

Ironically, however, because of this stance Riles has similarly been seen

as too cosy with finance, not critical enough, or participating in finance’s

own obscurantism. It seems you just can’t win in academic fields

predicated on clear lines of demarcation between analyst and subject of

inquiry, where “impurity” still means “danger” (after Douglas, 1966).

This is unfortunate, and speaks to a larger failure of critical imagination.

Riles’s work seeks to capture an analytical language and practice that

would accept, with the possibility of transforming, the world-changing

potential of the tools that build financial architectures. It offers a politics

without guarantee – and this is what is most disturbing to people who

still dream of a simpler, Manichean world of good guys and bad guys. In

a time when all our lives are bound with finance, a strictly denunciatory

position is difficult to sustain.

Anthropological and other social research on finance had

accurately charted the risks of the shadow financial system of derivative

trading and other off-balance sheet activities (Green, 2000, Pryke &

Allen, 2000, Maurer, 2002), the problems inherent in the mortgage

market in the United States (Langley 2008), as well as more general

issues around securitization (Maurer, 1999). All before the crisis hit.

Normative claims about the evils of finance cannot take the place of

empirically rich, analytically informed research on financial actors,

institutions, formulae and their effects. If it feels like going native, then

either we are in the good company of some of our anthropological

forebears, or we are striving for a form of collateral, collaborative praxis

that might hold hope for a new financial future (Riles, 2011, Miyazaki,

2007, Jensen & Winthereik, 2012, Gad, 2012, Holmes & Marcus, 2008).

The SSF and Riles approaches both ring true to us, perhaps

because of the financial/intellectual/institutional intertwining that we

discuss here. We do not see them as opposed so much as aspects of

different facets of practice. In other words, from our vantage point, they

are both “correct” insofar as they accurately map the worlds we have

inhabited together in our collaboration. In writing of the forms of

collateral knowledge that undergird contemporary finance, Riles, like

Maurer (2005b), finds a collaborative endeavor, and sees in it the


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possibility for new, joint work actually to reimagine aspects of the

financial markets and financial regulation. As she writes on her blog,

itself an effort to address and invite in new audiences with which to

begin to think together with: “Thinking together about theory and

practice can produce kinds of insights and solutions that neither side

could imagine alone. Of course how to do this, when the temporality,

the standards of evaluation, and the political pressures of our careers as

thinkers in the academy or in government or in the market are so

different is not easy. Working through these challenges is its own

challenge for our field”.4

In what follows, we document our own collaborations over the

past 5 years – how they emerged, evolved, shifted, expanded,

contracted. We discuss how, in seeking to delineate and understand

“alternative” financial and monetary practices – that is, self-reflexively

oppositional ones – we became an instantiation of what we had set out

to discover. This has implications for understanding financial and

economic worlds as plural and diverse rather than reducible to one logic

or set of practices. Critics like those we have alluded to will undoubtedly

see us as Pollyannaish at best or coopted dupes at worst. But we ask that

such critics forestall judgment for now, if only to be able to take us – at

first – as an object of inquiry, worthy of deeper investigation. As we

came more and more into contact with alternative financial worlds and

especially new payment infrastructures, and as our work impacted how

others were understanding, designing and deploying those

infrastructures, the very idea of one logic became impossible to sustain.

Reading Gibson-Graham at Intel

One day early in 2007, Mainwaring came to visit Maurer in his office at

UC Irvine. He was accompanied by Hsain Ilahiane, an anthropologist

currently at the University of Kentucky who was spending a year as a

“Visiting Researcher” at Intel. The encounter was unexpected (by

Maurer, at least). Mainwaring had come to talk about money. Maurer

had just completed a review essay on the anthropology of money

(Maurer, 2006). And Mainwaring was just beginning a project through

Intel Labs’ Peoples and Practices Research (PaPR) group on “everyday

digital money.” Over the course of the discussions that ensued, the

project’s title was renamed “Personal Digital Money.” We will not go into

the details here, but suffice to say that Mainwaring was engaged in an

attempt to shift the conversation at Intel about digital and electronic

forms of value transfer, away from just being about security and

4 (http://collateralknowledge.com/blog/2012/01/broadening-the-methods-for-studying-financial-regulation/)


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efficiency, and toward the actual uses to which people were putting new

electronic forms of payment, and their broader cultural context.

Included in this was an opening-up of the conversation at Intel about

money itself - an open-up that Maurer had also been simultaneously

trying to facilitate in anthropology (see e.g. Guyer, 2004: 175).

What was happening at Intel Labs at the time was a willingness

to experiment with different disciplines and methodologies. Having

Ilahiane formally ensconced at Intel as a Visiting Researcher was an

example of this experimentation, since normally such visitors would

have been engineers or computer scientists, under short-term

consulting contracts. This was not taking place at Intel writ large, but in

small corners of it, like PaPR. The effort to open the door to non-

engineers at Intel has precedent in institutional novelties like Xerox

PARC, famous for inventing the giant green print button on photocopy

machines as well as graphical user interfaces that gave rise to the

Windows and Apple operating systems. PARC brought social scientists

into the fold, notably, Lucy Suchman, whose Plans and Situated Actions:

The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Suchman, 1987)

quickened intellectual and design activity around the new field of

human computer interaction (HCI). Also in the early to mid-1980s, the

Associate for Computing Machinery (ACM)’s “social and behavioral

computing” group reorganized itself as the Special Interest Group in

Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI, or simply CHI), whose

conferences became important venues for a new approach to computing

that placed human interaction, culture and society at the center of

analysis.

At Intel Labs, as elsewhere in industry, HCI permitted a new

flexibility in the approach to computing and design problems. But it was

atheoretical. Or, rather, it was not specifically bound to any particular

theoretical approach. “Theory” was something to be brought in to spark

new conversations but not necessarily new commitments. Intel has a

history of this kind of engagement before Mainwaring’s work with

Ilahiane and Maurer. Under the Visiting Researcher model, academics

like Ilahiane got to sit in the cubicles and conference rooms while also

serving as ethnographic guides for Intel researchers in the field. This

model was based on an explicitly longer-term time frame than a simpler

consultancy agreement, with one year at least being committed to the

corporation in exchange for a salary and a different kind of research

experience than the ordinary academic sabbatical.

As part of the Personal Digital Money project, Maurer’s role was

different. It was a short-term consultancy. Maurer’s job was to bring

“theory” in this open-ended fashion to Mainwaring’s group. This made it

fun for Maurer – the opportunity to engage in an unfamiliar institutional

space with, as one of us put it, “very adult undergraduates.” It made it


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fun for Mainwaring, too – the opportunity to stretch his wings and think

outside the boxes of the engineers. But it was challenging. It was hard

for Maurer always to know what was happening on the Intel side. It was

hard for Mainwaring to fit the activity into the accountability

frameworks the industrial organization required, harder than, say,

providing a back-to-office report (BTOR) after a short stint of corporate-

style field research of 2-3 weeks. We will return to these points in the

next section.

At the start of what would become their long-term collaboration,

Maurer spent several days at Intel Labs outside of Portland, Oregon,

running a small seminar with Mainwaring and one of his colleagues,

Wendy March, a design researcher. Ilahiane dropped in and out from

time to time, but he was involved in some other projects at the time of

Maurer’s visit. Hovering in the background was Maria Bezaitis,

Mainwaring and March’s then-supervisor, who prodded us to create a

material record of our discussion and to sharpen our theoretical focus.

For Maurer, the initial encounters were strange: it was hard to figure

out what this lab and this activity in the lab was for, how it contributed

to Intel’s business of making silicon chips; it was also hard to figure out

the supervisory relationships and the expectations among everyone. For

Mainwaring, the stakes were higher: this was his job, after all, and he

had to answer to supervisors. The “collaboration” did not always feel

mutual, harmonious, or truly collaborative.

Social scientists at Intel usually focus on bringing their

methodological toolkits to the table: how to design and implement semi-

structured interviews, how to take ethnographic fieldnotes, how to see

differently in the field. Maurer brought a reading list of work in the

anthropology of money and the social study of finance. We engaged in

three days of discussion. We recorded the conversation and used Intel’s

resources to have it transcribed. Some of what follows captures the

dialogue we were starting to have. The topic was alternative economies

and alternative forms of money and finance. Mainwaring had a vague

sense that understanding “alternative economies” could help differently

enframe emerging electronic money systems than Intel’s standard focus

on such matters as processing power of encryption. Mainwaring and

Ilahiane had just completed some fieldwork on the brand-new mobile

phone-enabled money transfer service, M-PESA, a product of Kenya’s

main telecommunications provider, Safaricom (see Mas &

Morawczynski, 2009, Jack, Suri, & Townsend, 2010, Kuriyan, Nafus, &

Mainwaring 2012) and related projects in South Africa, and had

explored Islamic conceptions of debt and credit in Morocco.

Mainwaring and March had also done work in Japan on the use of near-

field communications (NFC) smart cards that are used for transit but

also for small purchases, and were exploring new online-based lending


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and sharing communities like Kiva.org and a Time Banking community

in Redmond, Oregon. Maurer’s reading list included works by scholars

writing about Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS),5 as well as

writing on alternative economies, non-economic uses and meanings of

money, and theoretical work that seeks to question the verities of

economic theory (mainly from geography).

So first we start with alternative. What is alternative?

What is alternative. Different notions of alternative. So

alternative in the sense of alternative to the formal economy

which would just mean the informal economy or alternative in

the sense of alternative to the whole notion of there being an

informal or formal economy in the first place?

This was [INAUDIBLE]?

This was in the Williams et al.6 And Williams et al basically say

that while for some participants LETS systems help them get

into the formal economy you know they learn some skills and

then they can get a job or it actually employs them and they have

a real job. And while for others LETS systems were helping them

to kind of almost formalize what already existed as an informal

economy. For most of them they weren't in it for either of those

reasons. They were doing it for the pleasure of community and

connection.

So it was a step towards the formal but then also?

For some it was a step towards the formal but for some it was a

way of formalizing the informal. Also enriching the informal

because we could draw more people into it then too. But for

many it was really the importance was to one side of the

formal/informal business altogether. It wasn’t about economy

or making money or anything like that or even I need someone

to babysit my kid. It wasn’t about that. It was just about creating

a diffused sense of social connection, and meaning and

obligation and community and local identity.

5 Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS), the brainchild of Michael Linton, are formalized barter networks that employ a software platform to keep track of trades within the system. Linton was one of the other keynotes at Mainwaring and Maurer’s Everyday Digital Money conference in September 2008. Mainwaring was interested in LETS as well as Time Banking as alternative means of economic value creation and exchange, and the fact that they rely on information technology made them potentially more legible to Intel than other alternative financial arrangements.

6 The text we were discussing was Williams, Aldridge, & Tooke, 2003.


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This is a snippet of the kinds of discussions we had. Running

throughout, the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham (Gibson-Graham, 2006)

served as a kind of touchstone, helping to orient us toward the

possibility of what they call plural and diverse economies. Here we were

discussing Jane Guyer’s ( 2004) reformulation of Paul Bohannan’s

(1959) classic article on the Tiv multi-centric economy. Maurer was

describing how he teaches Bohannan and Guyer to his undergraduates:

Start with Bohannan, then:

Then give them her [Guyer]. And so once their minds have been

blown by the possibility of multi-centric economy, she takes that

and opens it up and says, aha, but this multi-centric economy

actually only works in relation to the external linkages that it

had with Europe.

Mmm-hmm.

So then [...] maybe [the] western European derived economy

isn’t as homogeneous, blah, blah, blah as we think. Enter Gibson-

Graham. [...] you can see how you can sort of, it helps you sort of

open up an argument about economy and give you another sort

of set of conceptual tools then to think about it.

Mmm-hmm.

Along the way, this all led to the idea for an internal white paper that

would be circulated at Intel. Again, Gibson-Graham were central:

The more immediate thing is we wanted to do an internal white

paper, where we can put up on the internal website for people

saying, “Okay you’ve spent…you know six months now on

charity, purity, community, why should Intel care?”

Uh-hum

And that’s…I think with the paper…

Yeah, yeah. I mean even what’s….what’s here, even before we

started talking there was a narrative in a paper, right? And with

some of the stuff we talked to today, there’s more of…you know

in a way a framework that consists of series of matrices. But then

that speaks to some of this charity literature and some of this

sort of diverse economy literature. I’m not sure which one is the

white paper? You know or which piece is the…’cause this…the

narrative here you could imagine being sort of the flesh, like the

ethnographic meat on an academic paper that starts from Gibson

and Graham and sort of gives a matrix of charity and giving and

all the mechanism and means and modes or whatever. Or this

could be a white paper all by itself, I don’t know, I don’t what the

form of white paper is…is, you know.


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Well internally it’s whatever we want to make up.

Yeah.

It’s just something to…so what concerned me is…that I haven’t

written the damn thing, it’s way overdue. But it’d be

short…people have short attention spans here, they want it to

get to the point quickly, they don’t want…they want novelty.

They want non-obviousness.

Yeah.

So I want to…so one cut is…you know top level, “I want to blow

your minds Intel!”

We decided we would write a paper called, How Do You Hear

Theory? Or, Reading Gibson-Graham in Industry. We submitted an

abstract to the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (EPIC) conference. It

was not accepted. Another paper of ours, based on Mainwaring and

March’s research in Japan, was accepted at CHI, and went on to win a

best paper award (Mainwaring, March, & Maurer, 2008). We never

wrote the first paper. But the abstract for that never-written paper is

instructive, now, for thinking about anthropology with business in the

domain of money and finance. Our abstract read:

What does it mean to hire someone to “be theoretical?” This

paper reports on a collaboration between industry and academia

in which an anthropologist was invited into an existing

collaborative group not to provide methodological expertise but

to prod the group with theory. In this case, the anthropologist

introduced the group to theories of alternative economies. This

included the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham, a scholarly personality

made up of two distinct individuals – Julie Graham, an

economist, and Katherine Gibson, a geographer. Gibson-Graham

criticize/s unitary or homogenous accounts of “the economy,”

instead offering a vision of proliferating, diverse “economies” not

captured by standard or critical analysis of capitalist social

formations. By bringing Gibson-Graham and other theorists to a

group discussion about diverse and plural economies, the

collaboration permitted the hearing of theory in a context that

mirrored the form of that which the group was investigating.

Hearing theory did not just mean finding an existing framework

to help sort out data, but opening the conversation to new ways

of thinking and representing. In some ways, the theory brought

to the table was the least appropriate for an industry setting

because of its denseness. While academic collaboration in

industrial work is not new, this one is unusual because of the

location of an academic as theory-bearer rather than

methodology-sharer. Anthropology in industry has often meant


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ethnography as a tool or a means to an end. Here, however,

anthropology means listening to theory, not mining for methods.

As such, the collaboration about diverse economies participates

in a diverse economy of its own: unlike methods, which can be

transported, adapted and put into play in new contexts, the uses

of theory are rarely self-evident at the start and the ends are

uncertain. This requires that theory be heard differently. And

hearing theory in industry may also work to shift the

conversation about the uses of theory in the academy, as well. It

has the potential to soften or altogether obviate the divide

between “theoretical” and “applied” work while finding new

hybrid industry/academic spaces within which to do and hear

theory.

Years later, in 2011-12, other colleagues of Mainwaring’s, at

Maurer’s instigation, began reading Gibson-Graham, this time in relation

to questions about Intel’s supply chain and its relationship to some of its

suppliers. They are discovering all kinds of relations beyond “the give

and the get” (as one puts it) of market transactions. And in many ways

they are inhabiting a different world from where we were in 2008, one

where Chinese suppliers are central to IT manufacturing, where new

disruptive entrants like Facebook and Google are starting to occupy the

platform provision role that had been Intel’s mainstay, where Intel’s

own “ecology” of businesses (Moore, 2006) and services is no longer

centered on Intel itself but dissipates into a proliferation of start-ups fed

by venture capital, angel investors, philanthropic capital, and prize

competitions, these last two at least relative novelties in the financing of

industrial activity. The animating problem, however, was still similar to

what it was for us in reflecting on what we were doing back in 2008.

Diversity, Variation and Adaptation

One of many ironies is that we never really did deal in a sustained way

with Gibson-Graham. Their work was successful in motivating us and

inspiring us, but we never engaged with it in a deep, theoretical way. We

were not reading the work the way they had intended it to be read. In

our Intel seminar, it wasn’t really clear to Mainwaring and March why

we were reading it except that Maurer was supposed to be bringing

“theory” to the table, and here was “theory” embodied in Gibson-

Graham and some other articles and books. No matter how

ethnographic these works may have been, they were to be read for their

“theoretical” content, not least because this was the directive given to

Maurer, to bring “theory” to Intel. Since the reading was not tied to a

concrete activity “in the field” or specific analysis of data previously

collected, it felt like we reading for the love of reading. This seemed to


189

go against the surrounding institutional context and prescripts. For

example, we also needed credibility within Intel. There was to be an

Intel Open House where the Personal Digital Money project would be

presented to the wider Intel community. We needed an image that

would capture what we were doing. We took Gibson-Graham’s diagram

of the “Economic Iceberg” (see Gibson-Graham 2006). The point of the

economic iceberg is to show that most accounts of economic activity,

whether critical or not, focus on wage labor in the capitalist firm as the

paradigmatic mode of value creation and expropriation. This is only the

tip of the iceberg one can see above the ocean’s surface, however. Below

the water line, a whole profusion of economic activity is going on,

sometimes articulated to what is happening above water, but very often

not. Gibson-Graham sought to uncover and describe a proliferation of

diverse and plural economies irreducible to one logic or form. They

invoked one version of Darwinian evolutionary theory that emphasizes

variation rather than teleology: Stephen J. Gould’s spandrels and

“exaptations,” not Richard Dawkins’s “adaptations.”7

The open house was about visibility and tangibility. It was

important to have ideas visually communicated about the project, and

the open house was an important thing in terms of managing Intel’s

expectations. What were Intel’s expectations? That the activity we had

been engaged in was “research,” that the team had “academic partners,”

and that the academic partner had access to the kinds of economic

alternatives and value formations Intel was interested in. It was also

important that the academic partner was credentialed in a way that is

legible to Intel.

In doing this dance of accountability, of course, we ourselves

exemplified Gibson-Graham’s argument, and doubly so. First, adding

accountability in this fashion “formalized” our own intellectual and

monetary exchanges (insofar as Maurer’s consultancy contract

animated, authorized and formalized both), placing us above the water

line of the economic iceberg, looking down beneath the surface at the

supposedly more social, “authentic,” more “real,” less formal, alternative

forms of value creation and exchange.

But second, what we did ended up being an example of what

Gibson-Graham described as taking place below the water line: an

experiment in novel engagements with economic things (money,

corporations, universities, accounting principles, computers, etc.). For

Mainwaring had hoped that he could lead specific interlocutors at Intel

to reflect on new relationships of ownership. Academic partnerships at

Intel were not new, as we have noted. But ours was a little different in

7 See Gould & Lewontin, 1979 and Gould, 1991 on this debate.


190

its reflexivity. We were suggesting that Intel could think differently

about the value that corporations get from academic research beyond,

say, the leakage of intellectual property. The latter has been traditionally

the corporation’s chief concern with such collaborations. And we were

talking about, bringing to light at Intel, alternative economies while

unintentionally becoming one ourselves. We were creating in our own

collaborative relationship just such an alternative. We were becoming

an instructive example of what we were talking about.

Still, however, labs are tracked by how many invention

disclosures they generate, because they can be counted – not at all

unlike publications for academics. Mainwaring’s Intel colleagues wanted

ideas and theory, and to explore at a deeper level the complex realities

of diverse forms of value and economy. At the same time, they were

always aware that this was a consulting contract with specific

deliverables that fed into a larger audit culture about demonstrating in

the right way to the rest of Intel that we were doing “research,” and the

right kind of research.

For Intel, the discovery of economies below the water line

potentially has “real” value apart from protest or opposition to a

dominant economy or value formation. In money and finance, our work

helped tell a different story, about a system that could make, handle,

manage money and finance in a more humane way, or to serve human

agendas. Our project was also legible to Intel in that it served Intel’s aim

of trying to predict the future, to envision change before it happens, and

to see how random mutations open up new pathways. Here, Gould’s

spandrels meet Dawkins’s adaptations, as every potentially nonadaptive

element may open up new channels or paths for future value(s).

Becoming-With Business and Finance

While we were working out our own collaboration with each other and

with Intel, we were also becoming actors in the infrastructures of

payment systems. Immediately on the heels of the Personal Digital

Money project, Maurer founded a research institute devoted to new

mobile phone enabled payment systems, the Institute for Money,

Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI; see Schwittay, 2011). It is

funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A program officer

found out about Maurer’s work on money through another Intel

colleague not connected to the project with Mainwaring. Mainwaring

serves on the board. The institute’s mandate is to create new

partnerships with other academic and research institutes in the global

South, to foster their own research agendas within an overarching

rubric around new technologies of payment and banking. This, then, led

to new collaborative relationships with industry. It was striking to


191

Maurer at least that industry participants at the Everyday Digital Money

conference found it really difficult to figure out how to collaborate given

the constraints of non-disclosure their employers set upon them. They

discovered in the academic setting a space of (relative) freedom to find

new ways of talking to each other. This became one of the raisons d’etre

for the institute, written into its subsequent funding applications.

Providing industry researchers a space of freedom to pursue their own

priorities ended up being built into the institute’s mandate. For example,

one industry researcher, in the process of switching jobs, sought funding

from IMTFI for research in Afghanistan. As Maurer wrote in his proposal

for IMTFI’s funding renewal:

This project demonstrated the value of providing support to

industry professionals outside of their regular work – and thus

not subject to any restrictions that might be placed on them by

their employer. It created new audiences for IMTFI research and

helped inform these audiences about specific elements of the

financial inclusion agenda that had been opaque: from the

basics, like the costs to the poor of dealing exclusively in cash or

gold, for example, to more specific issues like the need to devise

SMS/USSD8 interfaces and the need to consider how funds in a

mobile money system are backed and how the float is managed.

For example, at a public presentation of the Afghanistan

research, several audience members commented via Twitter that

they would require additional training in how to program for

SMS applications if they intend to get involved in this space,

rather than focusing on the operating systems of high-end smart

phones (like the iPhone’s iOS).

This snippet from the proposal shows both the justification of

supporting industry researchers in terms of providing that space of

freedom, and the unintended effects of doing so (written here as if they

had proceeded exactly according to a preordained plan!). Note that

those effects included opening up into mobile financial services the idea

of programming in “old” languages in order to design new services, a

reaching below the waterline, perhaps, of Gibson-Graham’s iceberg, into

oddly non-market, “merely” operational protocols like USSD, or delving

8 SMS, short message service, refers to the basic text-message capability of simple mobile phones. USSD, unstructured supplementary service data, refers to an even more basic protocol that allows the phone to communicate with the mobile carrier’s towers.


192

more deeply into the weirder aspects of “market” relations like the

funds float in a mobile money system.9

With a design colleague, Camellia George, Mainwaring produced

a video (and comic book) imagining a world of future moneys and

finances where people would use multiple public and private currencies

simultaneously and in conjunction with one another, in arrangements

with merchants providing loyalty discounts, and with alternative

financial institutions, banks and brokers offering savings and

investment products.10 For 2008, it seemed far-fetched. In a world

where a social networking service, Facebook, now offers prepaid

credits, where there is open speculation that Apple will buy a bank, and

where personal, transactional data is becoming a new coin of the

payments realm, it was prescient. In the context of our work, we have

been able to interact with both the platform development side of mobile

payment systems, and the regulatory side (see, e.g., Kendall, Maurer, &

Machoka, 2012).

Independently of this, our collaborations with others at UC

Irvine and Intel Labs have resulted in another institutional/financial

arrangement, a research center devoted to “Social Computing,”11

harking back to the old pre-CHI “social and behavioral” moniker but

distinctly different in orientation. Where CHI’s progenitor emphasized

the gap between the human and the computer, the paradigm of social

computing we are now seeking to formulate focuses on the

entanglements. Our own entanglements in a way provide inspiration.

How can we assess the multiple engagements with economic

things that is our ongoing collaboration? This brings us back to the

debates over the anthropology of finance, and to a prepositional

commitment to anthropology with business. Isabelle Stengers draws on

Gilles Deleuze’s “thinking par milieu”. The double entendre captures

both the middle and the surround. “‘Through the middle’ would mean

without grounding definitions or an ideal horizon. ‘With the

9 It is beyond the scope of this paper, but the float in mobile money systems – the funds held on behalf of all the clients using the service who have uploaded value into their accounts – is generally not allowed to be intermediated. That is, the float cannot be leveraged by the mobile network operator (i.e., the operator cannot earn interest on it) nor can the operator use it for any of its regular expenses. Regulations in many countries demand it be placed in a special kind of trust account, thus removed for a time from capitalist economic relations. This is an alternative economy within the mobile money economy.

10 See Navigating Future Moneyscapes, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yT4q_ykGl4 and http://emoney.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/navigating-futu.html

11 See http://socialcomputing.uci.edu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yT4q_ykGl4

http://emoney.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/navigating-futu.html

http://socialcomputing.uci.edu/


193

surroundings’ would mean that no theory gives you the power to

disentangle something from its particular surroundings” (Stengers,

2005:187). We are both in the middle and not capable of being

disentangled from our habitat, the surround that we ourselves have

helped co-constitute and in which we operate. At the same time, there is

no easy merging of perspectives or positions here: we both still occupy

our separate institutional locations, with their demands, pressures,

mandates at cross-purposes, divergent temporalities, and so on. We

“intervene in [each others’] ethos” (p.189), one might say. And in that

intervention, we format financial and monetary relations for each other,

for the world of payments around us, an exaptation that nonetheless

opens up multiple and diverse pathways.

We would like to think that what we are doing matters at this

historical juncture, too. There are at present critics on the left and right

– and far right and far right – arguing for the end of credit altogether, for

the demise of state-backed currencies, for no final settlement on the one

hand and for a nostalgia for “community” on the other, that risks sliding

into the most reactionary forms of exclusion. The public sector is

eviscerated, and the additive ecology of money and finance we were

looking at back then at Intel, is now looking more and more like a

supplantive, competition-driving-out-alternatives ecology where private

currencies and payment systems actively seek to replace public ones, to

squash variation and plurality in the name of “freedom.”

We, too, have found a kind of freedom in our collaborative

endeavor, each in our respective yet ever-more conjoint institutional

locations. That freedom is of a specific kind, however, and may not be

seen as “freedom” in the traditional, liberatory sense: not an

unencumbering, but a re-encumbering in an explosive proliferation of

plural possibilities and relations.

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Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law,

property, money and finance, focusing on the technological

infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. He is the

Director for the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion

at the University of California, Irvine. Bill can be reached at

[email protected].

Scott D. Mainwaring is a senior research scientist in Interaction and

Experience Research (IXR) at Intel Labs and serves as the Intel PI for the

new Intel Science and Technology Center (ISTC) for Social Computing at

the University of California, Irvine. He may be reached at

[email protected].

http://www.imtfi.uci.edu/

http://socialcomputing.uci.edu/

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